Democracy AAP ki hai

The launching of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party – which, appropriately enough, shortens to the acronym AAP – seems to have ruffled several political feathers, not least because of its name. AAP’s declared manifesto to provide – for the first time in 65 years of independence – a totally graft-free government implicitly suggests that so far all the governments, involving all of India’s political parties, have been guilty of graft.

Whether or not this is true, the graft-free promise is certain to prove what in marketing jargon is called a USP – a Unique Sales Proposition – for AAP in the current context of a seemingly never-ending series of scams which have tarnished the image of all parties across the political spectrum to the despair of an increasingly desperate electorate seeking salvation from the rampaging dragon of Corruption, with a capital C for ‘Criminality’. Will an unlikely St George in the avatar of a white-capped social activist be able to slay this loathsome beast? Or will AAP, too, succumb to the snaky seduction of graft?

While that question remains to be answered, some in the Congress party have suggested that AAP has already unlawfully appropriated something that does not belong to it: namely, the term ‘aam admi’ to which the grand old party of Indian politics claims to have proprietorial rights. By incorporating ‘aam admi’ in its name, is AAP in infringement of patent and trademark laws and intellectual property rights? Moot points indeed.

The question that might be raised is whether the term ‘intellectual’, as in ‘intellectual property rights’, can be applied to any political party, ideologically bankrupt as they all seem to be. Moreover, in what claims to call itself a democracy can the ‘aam admi’ be said to ‘belong’ to the political class as a whole, leave alone a single political organisation? To say that the aam admi was created by, and exists for, a political party, or parties, is to turn upside down the definition of democracy being ‘a government of the people, by the people and for the people’ and turn it into ‘a people of the government, by the government and for the government’.

Such a formulation echoes Bertolt Brecht’s observation that if the people prove to be an awkward impediment in the smooth functioning of a government, the government can always elect a new people, more in keeping with its own wishes. Will AAP help to restore the people, the aam admi, to the sovereign pride of place they should legitimately occupy in a democracy? Both social and political courtesy requires politicians to say ‘Pehle AAP’, ‘You first’, to the voter.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .